New Shoes

 

 

    On the Saturday they went to town for the shoes, the red dirt of the road had already begun to dry into powder under the warmth of an April sun. Their house sat back from that road in a small clearing not far from the long, quiet reach of Lake Allatoona. Though the lake itself could not be seen from the yard, a damp weather breeze would bring a smell from that direction. The smell was the earthy scent of rotting leaves, with a faintly mineral undertone, coming from the water flowing over the granite outcroppings throughout the area.

    Roy had been awake since before daylight. He had split stove wood under the lean-to shelter attached to one of the outbuildings near the family garden. After he brought an armload of wood back to the house, he shaved in cold water at the basin just outside the kitchen door. By the time the children rose, he was dressed in a clean white shirt Eliza had ironed the night before with a flat iron heated on the stove.

    Thomas knew his father did not wear a white shirt very often, but he also knew better than to ask too many questions. He was sure he already knew what it meant.

    Money had been saved in a mason jar behind the flour sack in the kitchen cupboard. Not all at once, and not in any way that felt simple. A little from one framing job near Canton. A little from a porch repair for a widow who paid in crumpled bills kept in a Bible. A little from money Eliza had not spent at the grocery store because she had stretched lard farther or made last winter’s apples last another week in pies and sauce and boiled-down preserves.

    Thomas had almost stopped believing the day would come when there would be enough.

    Eliza wiped her hands on her apron and then set a pan of biscuits on the table. “Time to eat. We ain’t going to town on an empty stomach.”

    Thomas could hear a small brightness beneath her words. It was not happiness exactly. The kind of feeling grown people allowed themselves when they had worked too hard to trust good fortune.

    The three girls crowded around the table. Annie, the oldest of the sisters, already had her hair plaited, while Ruth still looked half asleep. Little May, six years younger than Thomas and all elbows and serious eyes, swung her feet beneath the chair and watched him with open curiosity.

    “You going to get the shiny kind?” she asked.

    Thomas shrugged as if it did not matter much.

    Roy looked over at him. “He’s going to get the kind that fit.”

    That made Eliza smile. She folded a biscuit open and spooned sorghum over it for May.

    They drove to town in Roy’s panel truck, its paint long dulled and its doors rattling when they hit the bumps on the dirt road. Thomas sat behind his parents on a wooden seat Roy had built and installed. He could smell his father’s shaving soap and the old leather of the driver’s seat. The dry dust rising from the road behind them obscured the view from the truck’s rear doors windows. Pine woods passed. Then fields. They turned onto a paved road and crossed a bridge spanning a narrow section of the lake. On that road, a scattering of houses sat a little closer together than the ones on their road. He watched each one as if the town might begin all at once, and he would miss the moment.

    When they passed a sign that read Canton City Limits, Thomas saw Roy’s hands tighten on the wheel.

    Thomas viewed his father as a strong and skilled craftsman. He knew his father could frame a roofline by eye and set a door so true it barely whispered when it shut. But there was something about store counters and men with pencils behind their ears that did something to his father. He grew quieter in those places. More deliberate. As though each word had to be lifted and inspected before it could be spoken.

    A bell sounded when they entered the shoe store. It was cool inside, and the first thing Thomas noticed was the smell of leather and polish, and something sharp and clean he could not name.

    Rows of shoes were displayed on shelves behind the counter. Brown. Black. Work boots. Sunday shoes. Women’s heels. Little white shoes for babies. There were more types of shoes than Thomas even knew existed.

    The salesman came forward and asked what they needed.

    Roy cleared his throat. “School shoes for the boy here.”

    The man looked at Thomas’s feet. The shoes he wore were not really his. They had belonged to a cousin, then to Annie for yard wear, and finally to him after the sides had split and been sewn, and the soles hammered back into usefulness with small tacks. One toe bulged slightly where the leather had gone tired.

    The man pointed to a small bench at one end of the counter. “Sit down there,” he said.

    Thomas sat. The man knelt and measured his foot on a metal device. Roy watched closely, as if wanting to learn some principle of the thing. Eliza stood in front of the counter, tightly gripping her handbag.

    The man went into a small storeroom and returned holding a box. While he removed the shoes from the box, Thomas barely breathed. Black leather. Laces unfrayed. Soles unscarred. They looked severe and handsome at the same time. Shoes for a boy who belonged in a classroom and had always belonged there.

    Thomas put his feet into them. He stood and walked a few steps. The shoes were stiff. They felt different from the ones he had always worn. He took three more steps on the store rug and heard the faint creak of new leather. It was such a small sound, but it seemed to enlarge the room around him.

    “Well? How do they feel?” Roy asked.

    Thomas hesitated and looked down at his feet. “They feel... right.”

    The salesman said they would loosen some with wear. Eliza asked if the stitching was good.

    The salesman smiled. “I’ll tell you straight. This is top-grade stitched construction. Strong stitching, good workmanship, and worth every penny! This is what I bought for my own kids.”

    Roy asked the price. He paused and looked at Eliza, then nodded once. Thomas saw the effort it took his mother to hand over the money to Roy. The bills were smoothed before they left Roy’s fingers, each one given over to the salesman as if it had history.

    When they stepped back onto the sidewalk, Thomas wore the new shoes. Roy carried the old pair by the tied laces. The leather of the new ones flashed once in the noon light.

    They did not speak much on the drive home. Nobody wanted to spoil the moment by talking over it. Thomas kept looking down at his feet and then, when he feared that he might look foolish, out at the road ahead.

    At the house, the girls came to the door when they heard the truck coming up the rutted driveway. They were outside before the truck had fully stopped. Ruth squealed when she saw the shoes. Annie said, “Let me look,” with the authority of an older sister who knew she had some right to inspect all new things entering the house. May crouched in front of Thomas and touched the toe with one finger, reverent as if she were touching something in church.

    “They’re slick as glass,” she said.

    Eliza laughed softly. “Off with them now. He ain’t wearing them out in the yard.”

    Thomas unlaced them carefully and set them back in the box. He did not want to, but the pleasure of obeying that command was part of the day too. It meant the shoes mattered. It meant they were worth protecting.

    They all went inside. It was a small, five-room house, with a wood heater in the main room. A bucket of water waited on a counter just inside the back door. Through the window, Thomas could see the worn path to the hand-dug well, the swept dirt of the yard, and, beyond that, the trees.

    That night, he set the shoebox beside his bed.

    Before sleep, he opened it once more. He ran his thumb along the seam of one shoe, then closed the lid again.

    On Monday morning, he rose before anyone called him. The sky outside had only begun to pale. Eliza was already at the stove, and Roy was pulling on his work boots for a job over near Woodstock. Thomas dressed faster than usual and sat to lace the new shoes with a care that made his fingers clumsy.

    “Be careful and try not to scuff them up on the first day,” Roy said.

    “Yes, sir. I’ll take good care of them.”

    Thomas left the house and walked down the dirt driveway to wait for the school bus to take him to the high school in Canton. He watched his sisters walking down a path through the wooded area next to their house that led to the elementary school. One that he had attended up until this year. Even though it was almost half a mile away, it was close enough that they were not allowed to ride a bus there.

    While he watched, he held his books under one arm and ate the buttered biscuit his mother had given him for breakfast. He smiled when he realized she had sprinkled a little sugar on the melted butter.

    He walked near the edge of the driveway because the dust in the center was dry and would lift in little puffs if he walked there. Every few yards he glanced down at his shoes. To him they looked almost too good against the red clay and weeds growing along the driveway. But that was the very thing. He felt strange and right at once, as if the world had finally corrected one visible mistake.

    At school, his friend, a boy named Harold Ford, noticed first.

    “Hey... You got new shoes.”

    Thomas made himself answer plainly. “Yes.”

    Carl nodded as if the matter were not worth much more thought, and that eased something in Thomas’s chest.

    A teacher looked down and saw Thomas’s shoes as he passed her desk. “Those are nice.”

    Thomas smiled, and even though the words were ordinary, he sat straighter for the whole morning than he usually did. When reading time came, he raised his hand without first checking whether anyone else had.

    The lessons had not changed because of his shoes. But the whole day, he moved with quiet pride and the relief of not having to hide his feet.

    When he reached home that afternoon, he wiped the dust from the shoes with an old rag before going inside.

    May was lying on the bed in the back room.

    At first, Thomas thought she was pretending. She liked to make games out of blankets and pillows, and to arrange herself in stillness, then pop up suddenly, laughing. But this was not play. Her cheeks were too bright. Her hair was damp at the temples. Eliza sat beside her with a cloth in one hand and a basin of water on the floor.

    “She took a fever after dinner,” Eliza said without looking up.

    May opened her eyes when Thomas came in, but she did not smile. That frightened him more than if she had cried.

    “She’ll be all right?” he asked.

    Eliza pressed the cloth against the child’s forehead. “I expect so.”

    It was the kind of answer grown people gave when they did not know.

    By dark, the room had grown close and airless. The stove still held heat from the evening meal, and the smell of sickness had begun to settle in, sour and heavy. May tried to drink and could not keep it down. She whimpered in her sleep, then startled awake and called for her mother in a voice so thin it scarcely sounded like hers.

    Roy came in after sunset, shoulders powdered with sawdust. One look at the bed was enough. He set down his nail apron and crossed the room.

    “How long?”

    “Ever since she got home from school.”

    “Is she getting worse?”

    Eliza did not answer at once. She wrung out the cloth. “Yes.”

    The three older children had gone quiet. Annie sat with Ruth near the stove, and Thomas stood in the doorway of the room, not knowing whether to come in or stay out of the way.

    Roy laid a hand against May’s cheek and then her throat. His face changed. Not dramatically. It simply tightened around the eyes.

    “We’re taking her to the hospital in Marietta.”

    The drive to the hospital happened in a blur of lifted blankets and hurried buttons and the truck engine coughing to life in the yard. Eliza wrapped May against her shoulder and climbed in. Roy drove. Thomas stayed home with Annie and Ruth because his parents did not know how long they would be gone.

    He watched the truck lights vanish through the trees. and then listened to the small house breathing around him. He could hear the kitchen stove ticking as it cooled, Ruth shifting in a chair, and Annie putting away dishes in the kitchen. He stood at the window long after there was nothing left to see.

    The night seemed larger without the adults in it.

    When Roy and Eliza came back, it was near midnight. Thomas heard the truck first and went to the door. His mother’s arms were empty.

    “Where is May?” he asked.

    “She’s staying at the hospital for a day or two,” Eliza said.

    Her voice sounded worn through.

    Roy came in behind her and sat down at the table as if his knees had weakened on him. There was a hospital smell on Eliza’s coat, that sharp, clean scent Thomas had noticed in town sometimes and distrusted because it seemed to belong to places where other people decided things.

    “What is it?” Annie asked.

    “A bad infection,” Eliza said. “They’re giving her medicine and watching her.”

    Thomas looked from one parent to the other. “She going to die?”

    “No,” Roy said at once. Then more softly, “No.”

    Later, when the girls had been sent to bed, Thomas lay awake in the next room. Through the thin wall he could hear their voices, first too low to make out, then clearer as the strain in them rose.

    “There’s the doctor,” Roy said. “And the room. And medicine besides.”

    “We’ll pay it,” Eliza answered.

    “With what?”

    Thomas had never heard his father say the word that way. Not angry. Not even bitter. Just cornered.

    “There’s some left from the job in Holly Springs,” Eliza said.

    “Not enough.”

    A long silence followed. Thomas imagined the scraps of paper on the table, Roy’s rough hands flattening them, Eliza’s fingers folded hard in her lap.

    Then Roy said, “Could take back the shoes.”

    The words passed through Thomas like cold water.

    He stared into the darkness where the shoe box sat by his bed.

    Eliza answered so quickly that it seemed she had been holding the response ready. “No.”

    “He’d understand.”

    “That ain’t the point.”

    “What do you want me to do, Liza?”

    There was no reply for a moment. When Eliza spoke again, her voice was quieter. “I want the child at the hospital paid for. I want Thomas to keep what’s his. I want all four of them not to grow up learning every good thing arrives with somebody’s hand already out to take it back.”

    Roy exhaled. The chair creaked beneath him.

    Thomas turned his face toward the wall. He did not cry. The hurt was too still for that.

    The next morning, he took the shoe box to the kitchen while Annie and Ruth were outside at the well getting water. Eliza was standing at the table, kneading biscuit dough. Her sleeves were rolled above her wrists. She looked smaller without May in the house. Not less strong. Simply as if some part of her had gone out and not yet returned.

    Thomas held out the box and then gently set it on the table. “You can take them back,” he said. “I heard y’all last night.” He kept his eyes on the grain of the table. “May needs the money... I can wear the old ones.”

    Eliza stopped kneading and slowly wiped flour from her hands. “Look at me.”

    He did.

    There was no softness in her face just then, only a hard-worn tenderness that seemed older than he had ever noticed before.

    “You offering because you love your sister?”

    “Yes ma’am.”

    “Then that’s enough. Put the box away.”

    He swallowed. “But if y’all need it.”

    Roy stepped in from the doorway. Thomas had not heard him come from outside. There was damp clay on his boots from the yard.

    “We need a great many things,” Roy said. “That don’t mean we take from you first.”

    Thomas looked at him. His father’s face was tired, unshaven now, the lines around his mouth cut deeper than usual.

    “I can do it,” Thomas said. “I don’t mind.”

    Roy came to the table and rested one hand on the shoe box. “That’s the kind in you. But you do mind. You ought to mind. A boy shouldn’t have to act like an old man before his time.”

    Then Roy pushed the box gently back toward him. “Those stay.”

    Later in the day, Roy went out. Eliza did not say where he had gone, and none of the children wanted to ask. For supper, she made soup from what was in the house. Thomas carried in the wood without being asked. Annie minded Ruth.

    It was after dark when Roy finally came in. He looked older by years. Eliza stood by the stove in the kitchen. “Well?”

    He nodded once. “Got an advance on the Johnson place. And sold the hand planer.”

    Her face flickered at that. Thomas knew the hand planer and knew how much his father loved it. His father always kept it oiled and wrapped when not in use. It had belonged to Roy’s father.

    “I gave the money to the hospital, and they said they’ll let us pay the rest over time,” Roy said.

    No one spoke for a second. Then Eliza let out a breath that seemed to have been waiting all day.

    “May comes home tomorrow,” he added.

    Relief passed through the room.

    Thomas looked down at his father’s empty hands and understood, more than he ever had before, that money was not simply counted in bills. Sometimes it’s counted in what’s missing and what someone had to let go of.

    When May came home the next afternoon, her hair smelled slightly antiseptic, like the soap used in the hospital. She insisted she could walk, but Eliza carried her in from the truck anyway.

    Thomas stood back at first, then came near when May reached one hand toward him.

    “You still got the shoes?” May asked.

    He almost laughed from the strangeness of that being the first thing on her mind.

    “Yes.”

    “Good.”

    She settled into bed and slept before supper. The house, though still poor and still crowded and still full of the same unpaid worries, regained its right proportions around her breathing.

    The next morning Thomas laced the shoes again.

    Outside, the dirt road lay red beneath the early sun. Dew still clung in the weeds. Behind him, smoke rose from the chimney in a straight pale thread. Roy had already left for work.

    Thomas started down the driveway to wait for the bus. After a dozen steps, he looked back.

    Eliza stood in the doorway holding May’s hand while the other girls stood beside her. His mother raised one hand and waved.

    As he sat on the bus, he looked at his shoes. Dust had already begun to dull the shine, and he knew that overtime the leather would loosen and begin to scuff and crease. Yet that morning, they still looked newly made.

    When he arrived at school, he did not linger on the bus as he once had. When he stepped out, he could hear the leather of his shoes give a small creak at each step, and he smiled.

    He entered the classroom as though he belonged there, which at last he understood he did.

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